Bitcoin Wallet Blockchain.info went down due to a DNS Hijacking

Blockchain.info, the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service went down this week due to a DNS Hijacking attack.

Crypto-currencies continue to be a privileged target of cyber criminals, Bitcoin wallets and services provided by many companies operating in the industries have been targeted by criminal organizations as never before.

Blockchain.info, the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service, suffered a mysterious outage this week and experts speculated that a cyber attack has disrupted the platform.

“Looks like our site is down. We’re working on it and should be back up soon.” reads the message displayed to the visitors during the downtime.

BlockChain informed its users about a possible DNS issue via Twitter.

We’re researching a DNS issue and looking into it. We apologize for the inconvenience. Stay tuned.

“We’re making progress resolving the issue, but it may take upwards of several hours until services are fully restored,” states a second Tweet from the company while users were not able to access their online accounts.

At the same time, someone on Reddit reported the changes in the DNS records.

It looks like blockchain.info has just had their domain name hijacked. The whois and DNS records suddenly jumped from CloudFlare to a cheap web host. From the cache, the names used to beName Server: BETH.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COMName Server: JAY.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COMand were then changed toName Server: DED88057-1.HOSTWINDSDNS.COMName Server: DED88057-2.HOSTWINDSDNS.COMwhen queried these are returning;; ANSWER SECTION:blockchain.info. 11360 IN A 192.236.200.26or;; ANSWER SECTION:blockchain.info. 14400 IN A 198.44.48.226″

What happened?

The DNS server records for blockchain.info and blockchain.com were hijacked. Usually, this practice allows crooks to conduct phishing attacks in order to steal bitcoin wallet credentials.

OpenDNS blocked the above IPs to prevent their customers using Bitcoins to fall victim of the scammer.

Fortunately, nothing happened to the Blockchain users, but DNS hijacking are very dangerous because unaware users could be redirected to rogue websites that mimic the legitimate ones in the attempt of stealing credentials.

Below the official statement issued by the company about the incident:

“Earlier today, we discovered our DNS registrar had been compromised. We took immediate action to resolve the issue. To be abundantly cautious, we’re waiting for the DNS to propagate universally across the web before bringing our services back. Once DNS has propagated, we expect to restore services ASAP. Our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience.”

At the time I was writing there is no news regarding potential breaches of the users’ bitcoin wallets.

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Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.